Google is indexing the page title but not the meta description

Question

The pages on my clients website, are built with SEO best practices. Please note that I am not an SEO expert, more of a web dev but make sure the SEO practices like proper title, description, hreflangs are adhered to.

Now, when the client searches his page with text from the title, the page shows up in Google search results. But if he searches with text from the meta description -ie a sentence of about 6 to 8 words along with the site name- nothing shows up. So, he is concerned about why description is not searchable.

And I am confused as well. why would it not show up, when searching with text from the meta description? even using text with quotes or "+" does not help

PS: the meta description itself shows correctly in search results.

Answer 1

Google never indexes the text in meta descriptions. That text isn't visible to users on the page. It doesn't even always show up in the search results. Google only want to index text that users see.

If you want those words and phrases to get indexed, you need to use them on the body of the page as well as in the meta description.

Answer 2

A long time ago, perhaps in the early 2000s, Google decided that visible page content was better to use for search ranking, and began to ignore meta tags for ranking purposes. This was formally announced in 2009. Search terms in meta descriptions won’t affect your search engine rankings.^{1, 2}

However, that doesn't mean they don't matter. SEO specialists emphasize the importance of meta description text to get users to actually click your links in search engine results.^{1, 2}

Here's what Google says about their use of meta descriptions in search results pages:

Google will sometimes use the <meta> description tag from a page to generate a search results snippet, if we think it gives users a more accurate description than would be possible purely from the on-page content.

The Google developers talk a little more about their choice of snippets from the page vs. meta descriptions here.

Yoast says "Search engines show the meta description in search results mostly when the searched-for phrase is within the description"